Editor’s LetterChances are as you sit down to read this new issue of 8 that you’re at home, or maybe on your way to or from there. Even the least nationalistic among us are intrinsically attached to an idea of “home” – whether a house, a city or a country – a feeling that only becomes active when that safe place becomes threatened.

Among the most compelling news stories over this past year has been the mushrooming of stabbings among London’s teenage population. Subsequent talk of “gangs” reveals a lack of understanding of a strata of society that can only exacerbate the problem. Adam Patterson has not just photographed young men like Vipoh but has forged a unique collaboration, inviting him to write across the photographs, making them his. Vipoh’s loyalty to his home turf of Brixton’s Loughborough Estate is a contributing factor to the stab wounds that puncture his arms.

The contested soil of Chongqing in China, claimed by the insatiable Three Gorges Dam, is the subject for Muge, a photographer from the area. Also documenting home soil, Tehran-based photographer Peyman Hooshmandzadeh focuses on the kitsch iconography in Iranian homes. Reinaldo Loureiro also returned home, to witness the more literal soil erosion of southern Spain, a landscape dominated by greenhouses.

We preview Observer foreign editor’s Peter Beaumont’s first book The Secret Life of War, in which he counts the cost of his time on foreign soil. Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, an Iraqi and Guardian writer, writes from Afghanistan, where his access to Taliban fighters is unprecedented.

For the first time, we publish two poems by Alexander Theroux, who responded to the theme of soil in a surprisingly sensuous way; photography as fiction with David Gray’s Vampire; and a special insert featuring archive photographs from séances in Canada.

Over the coming season, we are looking forward to the New York Photo Festival, in which Foto8 is curating a show and to our own Summer Show extravaganza at HOST. In the meantime, keep up to date with us on our website.